Thursday, December 28, 2017

If you think your tweets will be your key to
immortality, think again.

The Library of Congress, which has collected every
single public tweet published for the last dozen years, keeping billions upon
billions of our instantaneous utterings, has hoisted the white flag.

As of New Year’s Day, it will acquire tweets only “on
a very selective basis.”

The library will preserve its massive tweet trove but doesn’t
know how or when it may allow public access.

People say nothing on the internet ever dies, but the
quest for immortality in the digital age evidently will remain almost as
elusive as it was for the first emperor of China more than 2000 years ago.

Someday people may pore over tweets to learn about our
culture – oh, no! -- the way crowds in Richmond ponder relics of ancient China
at a spectacular exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

“Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of
China” provides a glimpse of one man’s attempt to cheat death. A richly illustrated
exhibit catalog helps piece together the remarkable story, and I draw on the
catalog’s details here.

More than 200 years before the birth of Christ, Ying
Zeng became the king of the Qin State at the age of 13 in 246 B.C. By 221 B.C.,
he had united the seven warring states and proclaimed himself emperor of all
China, Qin Shi Huang. He claimed his dynasty would last 10,000 generations.

Even before he became China’s first emperor, though, he
was obsessed with immortality. A history says Qin Shi Huang deployed 700,000
slave laborers for three decades to create a huge underground kingdom.

The subterranean kingdom stretched 38 square miles and
included a palace, armory, entertainment areas, stables for horse-drawn
chariots and large burial pits.

Nearly 8,000 horses and warriors made of clay and
vividly painted would protect him in the afterlife where he planned to continue
his reign.

The first emperor invented centralized government,
built highways and connected existing walls into what would become part of the
Great Wall. He instituted a common currency, system of weights and measures and
script for writing.

His tyrannical reign depended on strict laws; he had
books burned and scholars killed.

Wielding such power, he must have thought finding a
cure for death was in the realm of the possible.

His underground kingdom lay hidden until 1974 when
farmers came across a terracotta head. The archaeological find was one of the
most consequential of the 20th century.

Archaeologists have excavated only about 20 percent of
the underground world. Untouched is the emperor’s burial chamber, which history
says was constructed to mimic the country’s landscape with flowing rivers of
poisonous mercury.

The emperor’s mausoleum
site museum was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

The terracotta army exhibit in Richmond includes
life-size clay figures of an armored general and several other military men,
each individualized with a different face, hairstyle and uniform.

Besides building his underground kingdom, the emperor
also ordered search parties on long voyages to mythical destinations to find
the elixir of life. Just-released 2,000-year-old correspondence on wooden slats
shows provincials reported on promising herbs and minerals from local
mountains.

Today our quest to cheat, or at least delay, death
continues, although along more scientific lines.

People restrict calories in hopes of extending life. Some
resort to cryogenic freezing after death in hopes their bodies will be revived
later. Researchers explore promising enzymes and gene therapies.

Last spring, the National Academy of Medicine
announced it was developing a Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity that will
award at least $25 million for scientific advancements in extending healthy
life.

Meanwhile, we can learn from Qin Shi Huang, whose dynasty
didn’t last anything close to 10,000 generations and whose quest for eternal
life probably killed him.

He reigned for 11 years and died at age 49, reportedly
after taking mercury pills that were supposed to make him immortal. His dynasty
ended less than four years after his death.

The desire to live forever may be immortal, but the
terracotta army exhibit in Richmond ends March 11. Tweet about it, if you like.
Just don’t miss it.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

It’s not easy to summarize a year in a single word,
especially a year as tumultuous and polarized as this one.

Maybe that’s why lexicographers’ choices for the Word
of the Year 2017 all have a political hue.

Collins Dictionary chose one of President Donald
Trump’s favorites -- “fake news” -- as its word for 2017. Definition: “false, often sensational, information disseminated
under the guise of news.”

Merriam-Webster picked “feminism.” You’d think
everybody would know it means “the theory of the political, economic and social
equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and
interests.”

But when Merriam-Webster analyzed “lookups” of words
online to gauge public interest, feminism was a top lookup of the year, first
spiking after the Women’s March on Washington in January. As discussions of
feminism evolved with the news, interest in the word kept spiking, the
dictionary said.

Dictionary.com went for “complicit” after lookups
surged following a Saturday Night Live parody commercial featuring Scarlett
Johansson as a sultry Ivanka Trump. The fake ad was for “Complicit,” “the
fragrance for the woman who could stop all this . . . but won’t.”

Lookups of complicit surged
again after Trump said she didn’t know what it meant to be complicit.

The esteemed Oxford Dictionaries chose “youthquake,” a
1965 creation repurposed to reflect the significant influence of young voters
in the UK’s snap election last June.

“It is a rare political word that sounds a hopeful
note,” said Casper Grathwohl, president of the dictionaries of the Oxford
University Press, although he acknowledged: “It’s true that it’s yet to land
firmly on American soil but strong evidence in the UK calls it out as a word on
the move.”

Talking about words on the move, where’s covfefe when
we need it?

Covfefe epitomized President Donald Trump and his tweet
machine. It’s a made-up word he used in a truncated tweet a little after
midnight on May 31: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”

The tweet was later deleted, but then-Press Secretary
Sean Spicer, in an explanation worthy of the Alice in Wonderland School of
Spin, told reporters, “The president and a small group of people know exactly
what he meant.”

Instead of trying to settle on one Word of the Year, perhaps
we should think of 2017 as the Year of Words. Plural.

No president ever word-bombed the nation the way Trump
does, instantly sharing his mood swings with the masses.

Trump weaponized words, but he wasn’t the only one. North
Korea President Kim Jong Un must have been thumbing through an old thesaurus
when he called Trump “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” A dotard is someone
who’s elderly and senile.

The year began with Trump’s dystopian vision of
America. Inaugural addresses typically play to the nation’s hopes and dreams; his
stoked fears with words like “carnage.”

The new administration delivered “alternative facts,” White
House aide Kellyanne Conway’s infelicitous phrase for Spicer’s lies about the size
of the crowd at the inauguration.

The year is ending with the administration denying a Washington
Post report that the Department of Health and Human Services had banned the
Centers for Disease Control from using seven words in its 2019 budget request.
The words are: diversity,

HHS strenuously denied the prohibition, and CDC
Director Brenda Fitzgerald tweeted, “I want to assure you there are no banned
words at CDC.”

An
analysis by Science Insider, though, found the words already had been used far
less in CDC’s 2018 budget request earlier this year than in the three previous Obama
CDC requests.

The New York Times subsequently reported it wasn’t a
ban so much as a recommendation to avoid language that might slow or derail approval
of the budget by Republicans. So it appears red-flag words were banned as a political
strategy.

A firestorm ensued, of course, as free speech still
matters.

The American Dialect Society, a group of linguists and
other academics, will vote for its Word of the Year Jan. 5.

It would be nice to think its word describing this
rancorous year could be hopeful for the future.

But that’s unlikely. Its choice last year was more
prophetic than anyone thought. Remember “dumpster fire”?

Thursday, December 14, 2017

The dramatic election of Democrat Doug Jones as a
senator from Alabama was at once stunning and reassuring.

Stunning because it had been nearly 25 years since Alabama
sent a Democrat to the Senate, and just last year Alabama embraced Donald Trump
by nearly 30 points over Hillary Clinton.

Reassuring because it, along with last month’s
Virginia election, showed our political system -- messy and rowdy as it is -- still
works.

Trump’s winning the White House despite losing the
popular vote last year led to lasting frustration and a sense of powerlessness
among some Democrats. But in state and congressional races no Electoral College
stands in the way of the popular will.

The message from voters in Alabama, Virginia and New
Jersey this year was a resounding no to the benighted politics of the past.

“Decency wins,” Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican of
Arizona, tweeted Tuesday night, one several Republicans who praised Alabama
voters. Flake, who is retiring, had tweeted a
picture of his $100 contribution to the Jones campaign.

Jones had been the lead federal prosecutor in cases
against two Ku Klux Klansmen in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Baptist
Church in Birmingham, which took the lives of four black girls. Jones won convictions
in both cases in 2001 and 2002.

For Democrats who hope to turn back the Trump tide in
congressional elections next fall, the Alabama contest was consequential. It
shaves the Republican majority in the Senate to 51 to 49.

“This is a political earthquake,” said Sen. Chris Van
Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who heads Democrats’ 2018 Senate campaign effort.
He cited as part of the earthquake the elections in Virginia and other states
and localities.

Alabama answered the question whether black voters in
the Deep South will turn out for a Democrat who is not Barack Obama. Yes, they
can.

About 30 percent of Alabama voters Tuesday were black,
and 96 percent of them voted for Jones, exit polls reported. That’s about the
same share of the black vote President Obama received in 2012.

Solid-red Alabama suggests Democrats may be able to persuade
more Southern whites to vote blue. Obama received just 15 percent of Alabama
white vote in 2012; Jones got 30 percent.

And, perhaps more significant going forward, younger
voters and suburbanites in Alabama decisively went for Jones.

Trump remains personally popular in some quarters --
Alabama voters approved and disapproved of him equally -- but he exhibited no
coattails. His tweet and robocall endorsements were words in the storm of
words.

After his gubernatorial candidate lost in Virginia,
Trump lost twice in Alabama. He’d backed Moore’s competitor in the GOP primary,
then fully endorsed Moore near the end of the campaign and attacked Jones.

When Moore lost, Trump dodged blame, tweeting he’d
been right all along that Moore couldn’t win a general election. The “deck was
stacked against him,” Trump tweeted.

More accurately, Moore had stacked the deck against
himself.

Long before The Washington Post’s reports of
allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore roiled the campaign last month,
Moore had a history of judicial defiance and racist and homophobic comments.

He denied all the sexual misconduct allegations, and fewer
than one in 10 voters said they were the most important factor in their vote,
according to exit polls.

The splintering of the GOP also played a role in
Jones’s victory, but it’s doubtful another candidate anywhere could engender as
much bipartisan animosity as Moore.

The last Democrat who successfully ran for the Senate
in Alabama was Richard Shelby in 1986, who was reelected in 1992. Two years
later, he switched parties and still represents Alabama. But Republican Shelby
couldn’t stomach his party’s candidate and announced he’d written in someone
else.

It’s too soon to declare Trump irrelevant or Trumpism
dead, but neither has the ruddy glow of health at the moment.

Trump tweeted his congratulations to Jones election
night and called him the day after. Hoping to find an ally, he invited Jones to
the White House.

Jones has promised civility and to work with
Republicans when possible.

“The people of Alabama expect me to do the right thing
and vote for the people of Alabama,” said Jones in a news conference. He faces the
voters again in 2020.

Thursday, December 7, 2017

Last month, a Democratic wave carried Ralph Northam to
victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race, washing out Republican Ed Gillespie,
who had run a throw-back campaign.

More significantly, Old Dominion voters showed the
door to a passel of veteran Republican state legislators, threatening GOP
control of the House of Delegates. Several delegate seats are still in doubt,
pending recounts.

After the drubbing, President Donald Trump tweeted
that Gillespie lost because he “did not embrace me or what I stand for,” even
though Gillespie espoused Trump’s positions on immigration, Confederate
monuments and other hot-button issues.

If Alabama voters reject Republican Roy Moore as their
U.S. senator Tuesday, they’ll also be turning thumbs down on Trump, Moore’s
protector in chief, and on the toxic politics of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former
chief strategist.

That’s a big “if.”

No Democrat has won a statewide race in Alabama since
2008, and Trump won 63 percent of the vote last year. Much depends on whether
Democrats can turn out black and independent voters for Democrat Doug Jones.

If the tide runs blue in Alabama, Trump won’t be able
to blame Moore for keeping him at arm’s length. Trump has gone all-in for Moore
and vice versa.

A grateful Moore tweeted he “can’t wait to help” Trump
drain the swamp.

If Moore loses, Trump
won’t be able to erase his own failure by deleting his favorable tweets about
Moore the way he did after he backed Luther Strange, Moore’s opponent in the
GOP primary, and Strange lost.

A Moore loss would confirm Time’s choice of “The
Silence Breakers” as its Person of the Year. The Silence Breakers is the magazine’s
name for the many women who finally came forward this year to tell their
stories of sexual harassment.

Among them was Leigh Corfman, who told The Washington
Post that Moore touched her sexually when she was 14 and Moore was 32 and an
assistant district attorney.

“Nine
women have come forward to describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore,
including several who say he pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has
called the allegations `false’ and `malicious.’ `Specifically, I do not know
any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any
woman,’ he said in late November,” Time reported.

Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell has said if Moore is elected, he would “immediately have an
issue with the Ethics Committee,” which could lead eventually to expulsion.

Sen. Cory Gardner,
Republican of Colorado, said “the Senate should vote to expel him, because he
does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”

Political expediency
being what it is, though, such high-minded resolve could evaporate.

Consider what happened
to Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, who had the guts to say Moore’s
election would be “a stain on the GOP and the nation.”

Romney’s moral stance should
have earned him praise. Instead, Bannon, at a rally for Moore in Alabama, blasted
Romney for failing to serve in the military and for his draft deferment for
missionary work. Moore is a West Point graduate.

What Bannon failed to mention,
of course, was Trump’s five draft deferments – four for education and a medical
one for bone spurs in both his heels.

Voters in Alabama can
tell the rest of the country they’re not buying cynical claptrap from the likes
of Bannon and Trump.

It may not happen. Late
polls show Moore with a slight lead, and the race is rated a toss-up by Larry Sabato’s
Crystal Ball newsletter published by the University of Virginia Center for
Politics.

Still, a Democratic win
in Alabama would show Virginia was not an outlier. It also would be a good omen
for Democrats in next fall’s congressional elections.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

That’s what people often say, meaning it takes a certain kind of person,
with a supersized ego and laser determination, to put oneself through the
political wringer.

President Donald Trump proved he had the moxie to win the White House. Now
his performance in the Oval Office is drawing new questions about his sanity.

When the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced last year, Trump admitted
saying the vulgarities about women. He apologized and called it “locker room
talk.”

But recently he changed his tune, telling a senator the voice on the
tape wasn’t his and he didn’t say those words, The New York Times reported.

More than a dozen women have come forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate
behavior. The charges have rolled off his back, even as many powerful men in
the entertainment and media industries have lost their jobs.

He’s Teflon Don, one of Trump’s accusers said. The White House position
is that every one of the women is lying.

Trump endorsed Senate candidate Roy Moore and seems to admire the way the
Alabama Republican has steadfastly denied all allegations of sexual
impropriety.

Trump reportedly has returned to a favorite conspiracy theory of old, strangely
reiterating his claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya – after acknowledging
last year that the former president was born in the United States.

Trump clings to the notion that he lost the popular vote only because there
was widespread voter fraud, although no proof of it has been found.

At a White House ceremony Tuesday honoring the Navajo code talkers, he showed
his impulsiveness and lack of filter when he made a crack about Pocahontas, his
nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

And his sharing three inflammatory, unverified, anti-Muslim videos on
Twitter Wednesday was so far outside the norms of presidential behavior as to
be inconceivable. Except that for Trump, tacit endorsement of the far-right,
racist Britain First group was sadly par for the course.

“It was wrong for the president to have done this,” said a spokesman for
British Prime Minister Theresa May, who added that Britain First uses
“hate-filled narratives to peddle lies and stoke tensions.”

But Trump won praise from David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader, who tweeted:
“Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him.”

Thumbing his nose at an ally, Trump tweeted to May to mind her own
business.

During the campaign, Trump’s many GOP competitors as well as the news
media, Obama and Hillary Clinton questioned his mental stability and warned of his
unfitness for office.

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas,
called Trump a “pathological liar,” “narcissist” and “utterly amoral,” after
Trump attacked Cruz’s wife and father. Cruz later endorsed Trump anyway, and most
other prominent Republicans also fell in line.

This isn’t the first time a president’s mental health has come under
scrutiny. Richard Nixon was prescribed uppers and downers in an attempt to
control his moodiness.

Richard N. Goodwin, an aide to John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote that he studied medical books trying to understand LBJ’s
paranoid behavior.

Those interested in
Trump’s mental health can skip the medical texts. “The Dangerous Case of Donald
Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” a book
of essays, was published in October.

The authors concede no
definitive diagnosis is possible, but they say Trump exhibits signs of being a
malignant narcissist, a sociopath, paranoid and of having a delusional
detachment from reality, among other things.

“Anyone as mentally
unstable as Mr. Trump should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of
the presidency,” the authors write in the prologue.

Trump’s fans dismiss such
talk as politics as usual.

“Trump is NOT crazy
despite the claims of some mental health professionals” read the headline on an
op-ed by Andrew Snyder, a psychotherapist, on foxnews.com. Shrinks are calling
Trump crazy simply because they disagree with his policies, he said.

But you don’t have to
think Trump is crazy to find him reckless and rash. Not that Teflon Don is
about to change.

In Missouri Wednesday, he
was talking about taxes but could have been referring to his approach to the
highest office in the land.

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

After the post-Thanksgiving
buying spree of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday comes Giving
Tuesday, a day to give back.

On the Tuesday after
Thanksgiving, we remember the wisdom of the Beatles: Money “can’t buy me love.”
But giving it away can make us feel better.

Now in its sixth year,
Giving Tuesday raised a respectable $10 million online for charities and
nonprofits in 2012. Fueled by social media, it has grown and spread worldwide.

People in about 100
countries participated last year, raising $168 million for worthy causes, an
increase of 44 percent from 2015. The average contribution was about $108.

Giving Tuesday
encourages us to take a breath, reflect on what’s important and act on our values
by contributing time, energy or cash. Companies also participate, recognizing
that customers, especially millennials, like doing business with companies that
share their values.

Giving is so strongly
associated with our culture that the Museum of American History launched a
Giving in America project two years ago, collecting artifacts such as a March
of Dimes collection can and a bucket from the ALS ice bucket challenge that
swept the country in 2014.

The museum will
sponsor a day-long Giving Tuesday celebration in which kids and adults can
share how they give and why.

Facebook and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will match up to $2
million in donations to U.S. nonprofits through Facebook, which is also waiving
its fees for donations made on Facebook that day.

Observers credited the
rise in Giving Tuesday contributions last year partly to a “Trump effect” of
people speaking with their wallets following the election. The ACLU, Anti-Defamation
League and Planned Parenthood were among groups that reported spikes in donations.

The Trump effect
worked both ways. The Donald J. Trump Foundation raised $2.9 million last year,
nearly as much as it did in the previous four years combined. It donated about
$3 million to nonprofits, mostly to veterans groups, distributing more last
year than it had in the last three years combined, The New York Times reported
Monday.

Trump hasn’t actually
contributed to his own charity since 2008, but a couple of deep-pocketed donors
wrote checks for $1 million each. Trump announced he’s shutting down his
foundation, though he hasn’t yet, according to the Times.

Giving Tuesday isn’t
political and it doesn’t accept or distribute contributions. It encourages each
person to choose a favorite charity, donate on the charity’s website and
publicize the choice on social media with the hashtag #givingtuesday.

It was founded in New
York by the 92nd Street Y, a cultural and community center in New
York, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation. Founder Henry Timms, executive director of the Y, is
the son of one of my closest friends.

Many studies have
shown helping others makes you happy. Volunteers may also live longer, manage
their pain better and lower their blood pressure more than those who don’t
volunteer.

Behavioral economists
write about the “warm glow” effect. If you’re generous with your time, talents or
money, you’re likely to report higher levels of well-being.

It may be all in your
head, literally. Acts of generosity activate a part of the brain linked to
happiness, a Swiss study released last summer found.

Participants were
promised about $26 a week for four weeks. Half were asked to commit to spending
the money on someone else and half on themselves. After deciding how they’d
spend the money, the subjects received MRI scans and answered questions.

People spending the
money on others reported feeling happier than those who were treating
themselves. The scans showed generosity triggered a response in a part of the
brain related to happiness.

Interestingly, this
happened even though the participants never actually received or spent any
money. And it didn’t matter how much they planned to give.

“You don’t need to
become a self-sacrificing martyr to feel happier. Just being a little more
generous will suffice,” said Phillipe Tobler, one of the researchers.

On this Giving
Tuesday, we can all make ourselves feel better by acting on our values and
priorities.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

A great American tradition is again about to take
place -- and I don’t mean overeating, arguing over politics, watching football
and shopping.

Before those time-honored Thanksgiving rituals, the
president of the United States will issue a couple of pardons everybody can
agree on.

If all goes according to plan, two photogenic and well-behaved
turkeys from Minnesota will be driven to the nation’s capital. They will spend
the night in a luxury hotel before being delivered Tuesday to the White House,
where President Donald Trump will exercise his power to pardon.

The two lucky birds then will make the trip to
Virginia Tech, where they will join Tater and Tot, the turkeys President Barack
Obama pardoned last year, to live out their lives in a special enclosure called
“Gobbler’s Rest.”

Unlike the other 238 million turkeys raised in the
United States annually, these turkeys will never grace anyone’s dining room
table.

So, naturally, the question on Americans’ minds is: Will
the turkeys thank Trump?

This president loves to be thanked. You could say he demands
it. He asked in a tweet Wednesday whether the three UCLA basketball players
would say “thank you President Trump” for securing their freedom from a Chinese
jail.

The young men stupidly shoplifted in three stores in
China while on a team trip and got caught. “They were headed for 10 years in
jail!” Trump tweeted.

As presidents often do, he intervened and the three
were released. They did thank the president and the U.S. government. Trump then
tweeted “You’re welcome” and urged them to “give a big Thank you to President
Xi Jinping, who made your release possible and HAVE A GREAT LIFE!”

He also advised: “Be careful, there are many pitfalls
on the long and winding road of life!”

Speaking of pitfalls, it’s not true that Trump revoked
Obama’s turkey pardons and ordered the birds executed by firing squad. A satirical
website ran a “news” story to that effect earlier this year and gullible
readers have been spreading the fake news ever since.

But it’s not fake news that the feathered fortunates
traditionally spend the night before their White House appearance at the
historic Willard InterContinental Hotel, where the luxurious rooms cost upwards
of $350.

Rolls of brown paper,
pine shavings and plastic tape are involved in preparing for the guests, Time
magazine reported. No word yet on whether the new
hotel of choice will be Trump International on Pennsylvania Avenue.

When it comes to giving thanks, though, the pardoned
turkeys should be especially grateful to Virginia Tech.

Yes, Trump will pardon, but it would be news if he
didn’t. What happens next to the celebrity turkeys hasn’t been pretty.

The National Turkey Federation started giving
presidents a turkey for their Thanksgiving feast with Harry S Truman. John F.
Kennedy decided to send the turkey back to the farm in 1963, saying, “We’ll
just let this one grow.”

George H.W. Bush was the first president to use the
word pardon. He announced on Nov. 14 1989, the turkey had “been granted a
presidential pardon as of right now.”

Over the years, the freed turkeys were dispatched to Disneyland,
petting farms and Mount Vernon. Sad to say, wherever they went, they often died
months, or even days, later.

“The bird is bred for the table, not for longevity,”
Dean Norton, the director at Mount Vernon in charge of livestock, told CNN in
2013.

Fed a high-protein diet, the turkeys grow large but
their organs can’t keep up. They can’t fly or roost in trees like wild turkeys
and don’t live as long, he said.

That’s why the turkey federation sends two turkeys
every year – in case one falls ill before the big White House event.

The federation contacted Tech last year and said it
wanted to start a tradition of sending pardoned turkeys to universities with
strong poultry science departments, the Roanoke Times reported.

Tech’s Poultry Science Club built the enclosure in a
show barn in Blacksburg and welcomed Tater and Tot about a year ago. Faculty
credit the students’ good care with keeping the turkeys alive and thriving.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

After the latest mass shooting, President Donald Trump
and GOP politicians, including Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, once
again sent their thoughts and prayers to victims and their families.

It was, as always, too soon to talk about gun policy,
they agreed.

But with 26 dead and 20 more wounded in Sutherland
Springs, Texas, last Sunday, just 35 days after a shooting massacre in Las
Vegas claimed 58 lives, prayer, while comforting, wasn’t enough for many
Americans.

“Let’s not pray,” the Rev. Robert C. Wright, Episcopal
bishop of the Diocese of Atlanta, said in a Facebook post widely circulated on
social media.

“Please do not invite me to pray in response to the
horror of Sutherland Springs, Texas, unless it is to pray courage over elected
officials who intend to work for the ban of automatic and semi-automatic
weapons,” he said.

People feel powerless following gun violence; it’s
human nature to want to respond and fix things, said comedian and social
commentator Stephen Colbert.

“Five thousand years ago, if your village had a tiger
coming into it every day and was eating people, you wouldn’t do nothing. You
would move the village, you would build a fence or you would kill the tiger,”
Colbert said on the Late Show Monday.

“You wouldn’t say, `Well, I guess someone’s gonna get
eaten every day because the price of liberty is tigers.’ You take some action,”
he said. “You can go vote. Vote for someone who will do something.”

Most Americans must wait for congressional mid-term
elections next year to vote. So all eyes Tuesday were on state races in
Virginia and New Jersey.

In Virginia, whose lax gun laws have supplied weapons
to criminals from Baltimore to New York City, voters had a clear choice for
governor between Democrat Ralph Northam, who advocates tougher guns laws, and Gillespie,
a strong ally of the NRA.

After the Texas shooting, Gillespie was on Fox News talking
about prayer for victims and his “A” rating and endorsement from the NRA.

Northam has said thoughts and prayers aren’t enough. Proud
of his “F” rating from the NRA, he called for universal background checks for
gun buyers, an assault weapons ban and smaller ammunition clips. He promised to
reinstate the one-gun-a-month limit on gun purchases.

Northam beat Gillespie 54 to 45 percent.

To be sure, gun policy was only one issue in the
campaign, but it was a significant factor. When asked to rank five issues,
voters cited health care first by a wide margin, followed by gun policy as No.
2. Those who chose gun policy as their top issue split evenly between Northam
and Gillespie.

But among voters with a gun in their home, 37 percent voted
for Northam, as did 73 percent of those who didn’t own guns.

“We as a society need to stand up and say it’s time to
take action and stop talking,” Northam said at a forum in October.

He had the support of Americans for Responsible
Solutions, the gun control group founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords who
was shot in her home district in Arizona, and the Everytown for Gun Safety
Action Group, funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Northam campaigned with Lori Haas, whose daughter survived
being shot twice at Virginia Tech in 2007. Haas is state director of the
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Gillespie promised to uphold Second Amendment rights
and to reverse the ban on guns in state government buildings imposed by Democratic
Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Four years ago, McAuliffe touted
his “F” rating from the NRA, as did Tim Kaine when he won his race for
governor.

Recounts in several districts will determine which
party controls the House, but Democrats already have erased much of the Republican
advantage with the election of political newcomers.

Among them is Chris Hurst of the Blacksburg area, who said
the fatal shooting of his fiancée, fellow journalist Alison Parker, on live
television two years ago was one reason he entered politics.

Virginians showed Tuesday voters can choose prayers
and policy. They’re counting on Northam and the General Assembly to deliver concrete
action to stop gun violence, and the nation will be watching.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

When my
church in Alexandria made the news, I knew it would be a bumpy ride.

The historic
Episcopal church, after months of soul-searching, announced Oct. 26 it would
relocate from the sanctuary two marble plaques memorializing George Washington
and Robert E. Lee, its most famous members.

It may not
surprise you that some media reports overly simplified and exaggerated the turn
of events.

Headlines
trumpeted: “Cultural terrorism comes to Christ Church in Alexandria” and
“George Washington’s church to tear down memorial honoring first president.”

Blogs
referred to “ripping out” the memorial to Washington the church now finds
“offensive.”

Asked about
the plaques in a TV interview, John Kelly, President Donald Trump’s chief of
staff, criticized the decision and praised Lee as an honorable man.

Corey
Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors and a Republican
candidate for Senate next year, and others decried political correctness.

“The next
thing . . . is that they would take the name Christ off the name of this
church,” Stewart declared in a news conference outside the church.

Let’s take a
breath here.

After Christ
Church opened in 1773, Washington was one of the early worshippers and had a family
pew. His adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, gave the church one of Washington’s
Bibles after he died.

Lee could
walk to church from his boyhood home a few blocks away. He and two of his
daughters were confirmed in the church in 1853, and Lee attended Sunday morning
services April 21, 1861, after he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army.

His eldest
daughter, Mary Custis Lee, left the church $10,000 for its endowment when she
died in 1918.

The church installed
the two plaques -- “In Memory of George Washington” and “In Memory of Robert
Edward Lee” – on either side of the altar two months after Lee died in October 1870.

President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw the plaques when
they worshipped on New Year’s Day 1942. Over the years, so did Presidents Eisenhower,
Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan and both Bushes when they visited.

In the
decade I’ve been a member, there’s been a growing uneasiness among the largely
white parish that the prominent Lee plaque discourages black people from
becoming part of the church.

Then, white
nationalist Richard Spencer moved to Old Town Alexandria, and the horrible events
in Charlottesville last summer brought the matter to a head.

The vestry unanimously
decided “the plaques create a distraction in our worship space and may create
an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church . . . Accordingly the plaques
will be relocated no later than the summer of 2018.”

Emily Bryan,
senior warden of the church, told parishioners last Sunday: “Today, the legacy
of slavery and of the Confederacy is understood differently than it was in
1870. For some, Lee symbolizes the attempt to overthrow the Union and to
preserve slavery . . . The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence
feel unsafe or unwelcome.”

Where my
church stumbled was in not having a new location already chosen, so outsiders would
see we aren’t trying to hide our history. A committee will decide where on the
church campus to put the plaques.

Remaining
unchanged in the sanctuary will be Washington’s box pew, the plaque marking his
funeral, silver markers for Washington and Lee on the pews and communion rail,
and other references to the two men.

In the churchyard,
Confederate soldiers in a mass grave will remain undisturbed.